potrero view

June 2008

Publisher’s View Private Property

By Steven J. Moss

One of our society’s most fiercely protected tenets is the sanctity of private property.  By and large if you own something you can do what you want with it.  In most places in America an owner can let their property remain vacant, allowing it to molder into dust, or sell or rent it for whatever price someone’s willing to pay.  Non-owners are left to the mercy of the market to dictate where they can live, for how long, and in what conditions.

San Franciscans are less enthusiastic about private property rights than the rest of the county.  While we’ll chain ourselves to a tree to protect an individuals’ right to choose what to do with their body – whether that involves ingesting otherwise illegal drugs, having sex with anyone but a child, or surgically re-shaping one’s gender – more often than not we’ll fiercely oppose a tree owner from cutting down their property.  

Some of our resistance to allowing purely private decisions to dictate what happens to property is embedded in our sympathy for “squatters’ rights,” an unpleasant-sounding moniker that reflects our deep desire to protect old-timers from being pushed off land they’ve occupied for years.  We want the senior citizen who’s lived in the same Potrero Hill apartment for a half-century, or the granddaughter of a World War II-era immigrant to Bayview, to be able to stay in their homes and communities, even as housing prices rise.   

This month’s election includes a number of ballot initiatives that reflect this core debate.  Propositions F and G center on who gets to (continue to) live in Bayview-Hunters Point; and Propositions 98 and 99 are a duel over rent control.  Even Proposition A, which would impose a parcel tax to help pay for schools, contains a wrinkle on the debate, in that, like Proposition 13, it includes an opt-out clause for seniors, under the assumption that older property owners could be driven out of their homes if they had to pay an extra couple hundred dollars a year.  

While the debate many be value-based, there are real outcomes at stake.  Fewer low-income African-Americans will likely remain in San Francisco if Proposition F fails; while Bayview-Hunters Point is likely to remain economically depressed for a longer time period if Proposition G does the same.  Similarly, rent control acts to suppress housing improvements and ownership – both by making renting more attractive and reducing the stock of entry-level condominiums and TICs – in many cases to protect wealthy European-Americans.  But it also enables public school teachers, artists, and those on fixed incomes to stay in town.  It’s a complex debate, which too often has the texture of being between a steely-eyed rationalist welding patriotism and economic statistics against a wide-eye idealist who thinks that communication is best conducted by yelling.  

Whatever initiatives prevail this month the conversation will continue.  Perhaps in the future, though, the different sides should find a quieter corner to discuss their differences, and keep in mind that in the end none of us owns anything, or stays anywhere, forever.

   

 

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